Today's Opinions

Come August of this year, one of the alumni of the class of 1984 of Roane County High School will be a member of a team of 20 or so climbers who will scale Africa’s tallest mountain, Mt. Kilimanjaro.

This climber will be Roger Long, and the climbing group will be the Team Fox Kilimanjaro Expedition, organized by Michael J. Fox on behalf of The Michael J. Fox Foundation, which is an organization founded by Fox to aid in the fight against Parkinson’s Disease, from which both Roger Long and Michael J. Fox suffer.

By GENE POLICINSKI
First Amendment Center
The world news items about reporters killed, news organizations harassed, and unsolved crimes committed against journalists in other nations come nearly daily, generally in one or two paragraphs at most in a newspaper or online.

These attacks around the globe demonstrate the huge difference between press freedom as we know it in the United States and press freedom elsewhere.

I regularly talk to people who have ended up on the wrong side of the law and want to keep the incident out of the newspaper.
My answer is invariably a polite no-can-do. If the situation is a matter of our usual public record, it all goes in the paper.
We make no exceptions.
Employees of this newspaper are held to the same standard — including me.
Which brings me to the point of this column. On Saturday night, in a neighboring county, I was charged with DUI.
I wanted you to hear it from me first.

Shame on the Roane County News for devoting one third of its editorial page to “A View from Lick Skillet,” April 27.

I read Mr. Skillet for his down-home humor. This column, however, was such a blatant, vitriolic, diatribe against the LDS and Catholic Churches, I actually paused a minute to check and see if I were actually reading a county newspaper.